Welcome to Gaia! ::

People always said that April showers brought May flowers, but almost no one seemed to talk about when there was so much rain in May and June that the flowers were drowning in their own roots. Not to mention what the humidity was doing to her hair. There had been an intense number of storms lately, and with the storms came all kinds of difficulties, both technical and not. The gardens were a mess, a leak had been identified in the roof- some of the antiques in the attic would need restoration, and goodness knew if there was something mildewing in the walls now- a tree had been struck by lightning and burned down, and no less than three separate routers had met an untimely demise, wreaking all sorts of havoc that forced the household to spend unplanned quality time together.

Lucas was miserable, missing his beloved red-headed Lucy; Giulia and Aidan were constantly at each other’s throats, Hope was still starry-eyed over her first-grade graduation ceremony- Mama, I got a pointy hat!- and Jada’s phone had only rarely received a text message that wasn’t a duplicate or an absolute mess for days. The number of phone calls she had needed to take, and conference calls that had been disrupted, was bordering on insanity. To top all that off, even the ‘good’ messages she had been getting were sometimes hours delayed, and her caller ID? Useless- she’d accidentally picked up a call from an agent she had spent weeks avoiding. All ruined because June couldn’t keep itself together.

The worst part was the video calls she would get from some of those distorted numbers. A strange foreign language that she couldn’t quite place, and a shape that made her dark brow furrow in vague consternation. Whimsy and that shapeless shadow made her think of Caedus, always wrapped in his cloak- and imagine it was aliens. At one point she’d even sighed and tapped her phone, as if that could help the signal. “Glyn?” Jada had tried the word tentatively. But the staticky image hadn’t reacted, and eventually the phone had disconnected as per usual. (Aidan, of course, wondered who she had trying to talk to; the young man had been almost comedically disappointed to hear Jada’s excuse that ‘Glenn’ was a photographer she had been waiting on a call from.)

It wasn’t only the video calls that were getting the strange language, but it was easier to daydream with an image- and it wasn’t like trying the word had hurt anything, right? Jada wasn’t foolish enough to utter the phrase what was the worst that could happen, but she would try her luck with something similar.

One of the text messages that came through she tried to screenshot but was too slow. Still, boredom and temporary insanity led to mindlessly doodling the strange symbols on the edge of her notepad while she was on calls; Invariably, those notes found their way into the wastebasket. The Golden star charm she had gotten from the coffee shop would be traced around, occasionally pillowing her head when she dropped it to her desk in annoyance. Sometimes she would stare at her phone for minutes on end, fiddling with the golden ribbon, waiting to see if she would have another ‘technical difficulty’. “If I get another one of these calls,” Jada finally announced aloud to the attention of absolutely no one, listening to the twins resume screeching at each other, “I’m letting the five-year-old answer it.” If anyone in this house was going to recognize a garbled mishmash of words, it would be the one relatively fresh out of toddlerhood.